"The Whitewash Man"

*NOTE -This MIDI is indended to be played on a wave-table synthesis sound card (such as a Sound Blaster AWE 32) to hear the instruments as they were intended to sound.

This MIDI sequence is arranged for Piano, Banjo, and Tuba and is dedicated to the Rocky Mountain Ragtime Quartet who provided me many hours of listening pleasure at the 1995 Monterey Bay Ragtime Festival. The RMRQ was lead by Karla West, piano, Rod Biensen, tuba, Rory Thomas, Banjo and Jasper Kleinjan, washboard. Unfortunately, the General MIDI instruments do not include anything which remotely resembles a washboard, so I had to omit that part. Feel free to play along on your washboard if you are so inclined.

Listen to this music as it was probably played around 1910 by this very typical combination of instruments. Notice how the instruments play and answer each in the breaks between the 2nd and 3rd and 3rd and 4th strains. This interplay between instruments was popularized by John Phillip Sousa in his marches and was sometimes refered to as a "dogfight".

"The Whitewash Man" was written by Jean Schwartz and published by Cohan & Harris (NY) in 1908. Jason and Tichenor write: "[Hungarian-born Jean Schwartz (1878 - 1956) was] a prolific song-writer and composer of show tunes [who] had a flair for smooth harmonic changes, frequently with the bass moving downward, adding interesting color in an orthodox tonal format."

Lowell H. Shreyer adds (in "Ragtime: Its History, Composers, and Music" [John Edward Hasse, ed.]) that the tune was recorded by the pioneering five-string banjoist Fred Van Eps (1878 - 1960).